Installing NewsGator Social Sites 2010 – step by step

• You should have a valid installation of SharePoint 2010
• Social Sites 2010 is not supported on stand-alone installations of SharePoint 2010. In our case we had a SharePoint server and a SQL database server in the development farm environment.
• You should turn off antivirus software on the server on which you are running Setup, and leave it off for the duration of install. Turn it back on when install is complete.

Rights and permissions for the account used in the installation process –

• Local server admin – administrator of the server which hosts SharePoint 2010’s Central Administration site.
• Farm administrator in SharePoint.
• Administrator of the User Profile Service Application, with full control.
• The account must have sharing permissions to the User Profile Service Application, with full control.
• Ensure that the account also has dbcreator and securityadmin rights in the database.

Step by Step Install of NewsGator Social Sites 2010
1. Launch Setup.exe from the Setup folder.

2. It may be worthwhile to right-click and choose “Run as administrator” from the drop-down menu when you run the setup.exe. This launches the installation wizard and the Welcome screen is displayed. Click Next.

3. This brings us to the Pre-requisite check screen. This step checks for the necessary software and the rights required for this installation. Click Next.

In our installation, we had a small hiccup at this stage, where it failed at the Check SharePoint version. The error message was “Unable to access the farm”.
In spite of granting all the said rights to the installation account, we discovered that the installation account required SPShellAdmin rights. After giving these rights, everything proceeded smoothly.
4. If any previous components have already been installed, these can be seen at this stage.

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5. If not, you see the Installation options screen for choosing which components are required to be installed. Check the ones you want. Also, specify the My Site Host Location and the Email List Website location which is a SharePoint list stored on a SharePoint website.

6. Enter a valid license key provided by the NewsGator support team.

7. This screen displays all the Web applications on your farm (except Central Admin) to help choose where you want the Social Sites deployed.

8. You may choose to use an existing application pool, or creating a new app pool may also be a good idea.

9. Provide a DB server and a database name for hosting the Social database. Use SharePoint’s default server for content databases. Click Next.

10. Provide a database server and database name. Click Next.

11. Click Install for beginning the component install. This will take a couple of minutes.

After all the components have installed, you see the Installation Complete screen. Now is the time for an IISRESET.
This completes the installation of NewsGator Social Sites 2010 on your server.
You may now turn on the anti-virus software on the server as well.